Hey, I'm the one who made this. Glad you guys liked it! This one was a bit quick and dirty, done for a workshop at the Mozilla Festival last year, I'm going to try to do another installment though!
I'm going to add a version of this soon! Not overlays, but at least popping up the neighborhood name histories when you use the "Jump To" neighborhoods list in the corner. I didn't make it too high a priority since most of them are either duplicates of street histories (e.g. Cole Valley, Upper Haight, the Mission) or self-explanatory (e.g. the Sunset, Chinatown, the Marina).
I would imagine there's a lot of overlap in the names! Plenty of the SF streets are for figures of general California/Bay Area history, not purely local figures. There are also a bunch of folks like Jack London and Ralph Kirkham who had some notoriety in both cities.
Well, I'm interested in history generally, but I'm not sure I was an SF history obsessive going into this project. I was just interested in the fact that I was surrounded by streets that were clearly all named after people and I had no idea who they were. I thought a map like this would be a cool way to see those same streets I walk/drive down all the time a little differently.
Yeah, there are lots of categories like neighborhood names that have their own interesting stories but I wasn't sure how to display. Definitely lots of room for improvement, there are also plenty of gaps in the streets, I'll hopefully be able to fill some of those in in the coming weeks.
Hey guys, I made this map. Happy to answer any questions about how it was done, I'm going to do a detailed writeup when I have a chance. The short version is: no Wikipedia link-up, it's all manual research from archives, books, and sites (including Wikipedia). There are lots of Wikipedia links included but that's just for people who want more detail than I included in the descriptions. I parsed the street/polygon geometry from OSM and tied it together with Leaflet and then added lots of nitpicky extra design choices in JS.